Wednesday, 18 November 2015

Getting on with the DAMN job

I was looking through my old art files on a spare hard drive and thought this might make an interesting post. I started on DAMN in September '13. I'm not sure how I got involved but I had been working with Daniel Bishop and Paul Wolfe on several projects, so I suspect they were somehow instrumental.

Below are a series of progress pieces of the cover taking shape - you may notice that Hugh the Barbarian at one stage was going to appear on the cover but for potential legal reasons I changed to just a savage barbarian to take that place on the screen. For those of you who haven't purchased issue one of DAMN (for shame), it was dedicated to Ray Harryhausen who had recently passed, so I tried to use as many iconic Harryhausen monsters I could - as did Daniel with his adventure.

First draft

I always loved that cyclops! I wanted something that divided the front and back covers and initially it was going to be that tree. But I scrapped that and went with a different setting altogether after reading the adventure.

And Harryhausen's medusa - well, I don't think anyone else has come close - mind you, I am a fan or Tony Randall as the medusa in The 7 Faces of Dr Lao.

Above is where Hugh was going to cameo before we thought better of it lol. I had to have the Jason and the Argonauts skeletons. And Calibos to accompany Medusa.

BTW the guy getting turned to stone is me - at least I got one cameo in there.

And there we have it.

As much as I liked the cover my favourite piece from issue 1 of DAMN was the dragon illustration (another 7th Voyage of Sinbad monster).

I had an idea for the cover for issue 2 but I have since incorporated it as you may recognize...